2020 09 12 - State Park, Interstate

My wife did not want to drive too far today, but knowing we would be going to Afton, Ft Snelling and William O'Brien often, we decided to drive a little further and ended up at Interstate Park near Taylor's Falls MN.

We had looked online and there was a notice that the park might be crowded and parking was limited. But we took a chance, if it was crowded, we had plans to keep driving to Wild River north of Taylor's Falls ... about another 15 miles up the road.

This park has two main area's. The one by the boat loading and rocks is the more well known and more visited. There is a second area, a camping area, a mile or so to the south. That is where we parked today. No crowds, almost no cars.

My wife has to use the restroom/out house almost right away so we park close to them and we each go into one.

... I grew up on a farm so I am not too easily effected by odors. But this place was almost strong enough to knock you out with an ammonia smell. There should have been a warning sign on the door.

We started walking on the paved trail but that was fairly short so we headed south on a narrow path. That quickly ended at the river. We did look at another path, but some how a little stream re-routed itself from the gully it had been using and was now flowing down the path ... so that was out.

By now when we walked through the parking area again there were a few more cars.

We walked a little further to the north and then we got to steps. What ever steps we did, we would have to do twice so we turned around.

We did walk through the campground. RV campground. It seemed that they were trying to space the RV's every other camping spot. It's as congested here as it is in most commercial campgrounds. Some places had RV's next to each other but I am guessing they were family.

We walked our usual 45 minutes are so before leaving.

Getting to the next place we were going, we headed off of Hwy 8 onto Lawrence Creek Road. This is likely the original Hwy 8 or Hwy 95. It has guard cables along a dirt road, the cables look quite a big bigger than the ones they use today.

As long as we were out, we had decided to stop at a little cemetery to look for one grave. We walked the whole thing before I looked at a website and saw that those people couldn't find a maker either so there likely isn't one. This cemetery has less than 400 markers so it we could walk it in less than a half hour.

Failure here, so we went another few miles down the road to Lindstrom and a cemetery there. Here we walked for over an hour on the grass and on the pavement looking for grave markers. We finally gave up and I emailed someone who works with IDing the grave markers in that county and he told me where the last one ... next time.

So over the course of about three hours we had about two hours walking today. I was almost all in by the time we quit at the last cemetery.